@Kyeh Yes, Kickstarter is older, but it is different than VMP. Kickstarter people “kicked” in a few bucks to get this site going. (click on the red banner)
VMP started the first day that Meh was actually up and running in July 2014.
The Mediocre forum started in Sept. 2013, before any of this. Yep, people just sat around talking and speculating about what all of this was going to be like. Imagine that.
@Barney@mossygreen
Yeah, I was going by the fact that mossygreen and @Ignorant have the “K” and also the Sept. 13 start date.
I’ve contributed to three Kickstarters over the years - one just failed, evidently - I never got the promised gift; one didn’t succeed but did deliver the bonus, and the third succeeded and sent me the gift as well. They all cost a lot more than the Meh one!
@Kyeh Yep, I’ve invested in a few Kickstarters that never got off the ground. When I received the Kickstarter offer from Matt, I knew that it was mainly for “funsies”.
I’m still waiting to see if Meh is going to work out.
@Kyeh I stumbled upon Woot in 2010. I was brand new to computers; I mean BRAND NEW. In fact I was using a kid’s computer called an OLPC xo. I didn’t really like the main Woot site because I was so afraid that I was going to screw up something. But I did find Deals.Woot and the people there were nice enough to help me out so that I wouldn’t do something dumb and get into trouble (most of the time).
Matt hung out on this site a lot. In fact many of the K’s that Meh has, hung out on Deals.
Are you on Woot? I am now katblue there. (Barney was already taken.)
@Barney Wow, 2010! I haven’t spent much time (or money) at Woot, although I’ve bought some tee shirts, and I found a refurbished Ninja Foodi toaster oven there for my mother and brother. But is Deals a separate site from the main Woot?
@Kyeh Oh, there’s a lot of people around here that have been with Woot a very long time – from their beginning.
Deals was a part of Woot; we would post good deals that we found on the internet, kind of like our posting of deals here, but a whole lot more of them.
We had our own separate forum, too.
But bots and spammers started taking over the site and it was getting harder and harder to clean them out. Also, we might have gotten a little rowdy over there. So, they shut us down.
I think you would have really liked it. (Ha, not that I’m saying you are rowdy.)
@Barney Rowdier than Meh?? Or just less tolerable to the Amazon overlords? I looked at the current forum on Woot a time or two but it seemed boring compared to this one. I was actually pretty leery of this one at first, but got drawn in by the humor. Then over the pandemic it became a good escape from boredom and isolation. My sister thinks it’s stupid !
@Kyeh The Woot forum is boring. Deals was fun and, yes, probably part of the reason it was shut down is that we did not comply with the new Amazon management.
I still miss it and there are others around here who do, too.
@Barney@Kyeh I actually found Woot in Oct of '09, but never took to the forums. Well, I would poke around Deals or what was it, Mofi or somethong??
Anyway, guess I should have joined in on the fun sooner
I first found Woot thru a deals site link I think in 2010, tho I’d heard of them in the tech press years before, from the early days when they sometimes did special deals as product launches.
I think they started up in 2004, if that’s true, then I was a latecomer to the site.
Once I found Woot, I liked the forum conversations, and I liked the “conversational feel” of deals.woot forums quite a bit better than content/topics on the main site. So I stayed. And it was a lot of fun for a while.
Then Woot got sold to Amazon, and quite a few Woot employees who transitioned to Amazon couldn’t tolerate the new, and I suspect, hyper controlled, hyper competitive Amazon corp culture and so they started leaving Amazon.
Besides, there was that conversation where Bezos kinda suggested that he thought of Woot as an exotic meal he could consume, snd presumably digest then either comprehend … or, at least, use to his purposes.
I think @snapster started up Mediocre and Meh, bringing along many of his old Woot co-workers, as soon as the non-compete expired.
@snapster let the people in the Woot forums know about the new venture, and many folk started to call both places a sort of online home.
As for rowdiness, the deals.woot crowd weren’t rowdy, tho sometimes they criticized some questionable/nasty forum decisions/enforcement by the deals.woot mods.
(The deals.woot mods often gave the impression of being quite immature, self-absorbed, out-of-control, and professionally-offended, even in comparison to a two year old in the midst of a full-on tantrum.)
And at one point the deals.woot mods acted/posted very unprofessionally and horribly toward the forum members: there was mod remark that kinda compared the forum people to excrement (and that wasn’t intended as a joke)
At that event, many of the most loyal, kind, and interesting deals.woot posters left deals.woot and main woot forever. (Remember the wonderful @hobbit?).
And then the conversation declined, with some many excellent folk gone for good
But what really killed deals.woot was the deal spam by every charlatan or counterfeiter with a keyboard.
There was a main forum section for posting deals, and a second forum section for just conversation.
Deals could be voted on, which meant that every counterfeiting-type and charlatan-type deal poster was busy hiring companies or paying employees/family/friends to upvote their overpriced junk.
So the deals section became pure garbage. The main deals forums were filled with junk deals to the point that no one bothered to post good deals anymore.
And that drove away the the rest of the conversationalists;
those people came here, or went to the main woot forums, or vanished. The genuine conversation dwindled and dwindled. V sad to watch.
And so deals.woot became something hideous and unbearable, having once been wonderful.
And finally, when deals.woot had become little more than pure, unadulterated spam/junk, woot pulled the plug on a site that had become a no more than a useless, garbage-filled monstrosity.
@cf1 As I recall, there were hints on Woot that something interesting was coming soon but you had to sign up with google or something else I don’t have so I was totally unaware of all the beginning of Meh stuff.
7/14. Today is my first day back here in years. Life took over and I forgot all about Meh until I was reminded of it randomly in conversation with my wife
Just looked on my profile 11/2016. My last order was in 2020 (though it is something that I use on the daily! Such a good deal). Exactly what am I paying $5/mo for? I guess to keep the site going, and knowing that I’m not going to be able to get back in if I cancel, so there’s some exclusivity to it I guess.
Half of the crap is now QVC sites with washed up celebrities. Do they really think that the same people who think weird gadgets are cool watch the morning talk whatever at the retirement community? They have 2 or more of those sites.
Oh my, my $5 a month, without any VMP IRKs (Thanks, again, for kick in the nuts, to bots and fiber connections.)
I wrote to customer service saying my giftee really loved the blue 5.5qt BK dutch oven. None left! I would even pay the same price. I thought, maybe they would see: wow, you have paid a lot of money, rarely got irks but always tried, we promised perks, it isn’t blue but here is whatever… thanks for being a VMP.
I would put money on them offering BK dutch ovens, maybe blue?, in the exact size and never ever contacting me beyond that.
I got a crap faux-weber grill I paid for. Customer service wanted me to ship it back. Come on, that makes no sense. I just ate it and have not use it sense. BTW if you are in Central OH, you are welcome to it.
If it were not for casemates and the people who have randomly sent me stuff because of their kidness, there is absolutely no reason for me to keep this. meh doesn’t care about me, my loyalty, my anything but so long as their monthly charge goes through.
In the early years I would cancel my VMP if I went a month without buying anything, and when we got the announcement that VMP was going away, I was off it and figured I’d stay off it. It was disabled beginning on March 1, 2017, but IIRC it didn’t actually get disabled until the middle of that day. I signed up for it in those final hours, figuring I’d cancel within a month if I didn’t use it, but I’ve used it enough since to where I kept it til now.
I imagine my fellow 3/17 VMPers are few and far between, considering the circumstances.
@lljk Hi 3/2017 twin! I had canceled when you could still go back on also. I was debating whether to sign up again when the announcement was posted then forgot and remembered on the first.
Officially 8/16, but there was a card lapse in there so no idea how long it’s really been. Though I was too late to get any of the mythical freebies I’ve heard about.
I’ve been a VMP since around the third month after Meh launched, however my credit card lapsed and although I was able to get my status back, my “member since” date is off
Wine.woot was my thing. Cause not just wine but lots of gourmet / foodie goodies. My daughter actually discovered woot and the BoCs … I remember when she bought her first. She quickly lost interest
11/2014, bought the thanksgiving turkey cooking package because we needed something in it, I can’t remember what. Wine woot kickstarter, I’m getting more out of that than meh these days.
@SColburn - Whoa!
I started 7/14 with a one-day blip somewhere along the line.
$480 Pushing me that much closer to the quitting precipice, though to be fair, that amount is ameliorated by some decent Fuku luck.
Just wondering what I am. Well at least in the meh world. I’m sure I’m human. I should have joined on the first day. wow, it doesn’t come up anything. I wonder if meh took it away from me?
7/14
10/14.
@poids @yerti I’m also 10/14
@poids Same for me
8/14
@spectra242 me too 8.14
10.15 but it expired once in the first year. Due to bank changing my card number
So I am thinking it was really July or August 2014
06/15, and still no regrets
@tajbro Shame you’ve never got an IRK.
2016-04 Mine should be from much earlier but a compromised credit card and a broken leg caused a lapse.
@yakkoTDI Wow, nobody told you that you could renew online? That’s just plain mean!
@ircon96 Since I was born with no arms I use my feet to control the computer. I was at a slight disadvantage that month.
@yakkoTDI Way to be a quitter!
Holy crap, 9/13. That’s a lot of $5.
8/14 I also had a problem with a expired card, so there’s that.
11/14
7/14
Got here late. 4/17.
11/15
At day 1 or something like that. Only, card kept expiring.
@f00l Stop using stolen credit cards.
@yakkoTDI
Why? I can’t think of a single reason for me to end this most pleasant practice.
But … as you disapprove of me doing things this way, I will spare you from receiving any pointers as to how to pull it off.
BTW, in particular, I enjoy using @snapster’s credit cards to pay for my VMP charges.
But, perhaps, the next time a VMP charge is disallowed for me while I’m using a @snapster credit card, I’ll sub in one of yours.
Thanks!
Only since 20Jan2017. Ordered a refurb foodsaver. Still going strong!
I assume anyone with a Kickstarter “K”
is going to be one of the oldest, right?
2013 at the earliest?
@Kyeh Yes, Kickstarter is older, but it is different than VMP. Kickstarter people “kicked” in a few bucks to get this site going. (click on the red banner)
VMP started the first day that Meh was actually up and running in July 2014.
The Mediocre forum started in Sept. 2013, before any of this. Yep, people just sat around talking and speculating about what all of this was going to be like. Imagine that.
@Barney @Kyeh I don’t have an option to see Meh vs. Mediocre, it just says I joined 9/11/13 at 1:09 am eastern.
@Barney @mossygreen
Yeah, I was going by the fact that mossygreen and @Ignorant have the “K” and also the Sept. 13 start date.
I’ve contributed to three Kickstarters over the years - one just failed, evidently - I never got the promised gift; one didn’t succeed but did deliver the bonus, and the third succeeded and sent me the gift as well. They all cost a lot more than the Meh one!
@mossygreen
Directly under your name it says that you are a Very Mediocre Person (since July 2014).
(And then the next line says that you joined on Wed, Sept 11 2013.
)
@Kyeh Yep, I’ve invested in a few Kickstarters that never got off the ground. When I received the Kickstarter offer from Matt, I knew that it was mainly for “funsies”.
I’m still waiting to see if Meh is going to work out.
@Barney How did you originally discover Woot?
@Kyeh I stumbled upon Woot in 2010. I was brand new to computers; I mean BRAND NEW. In fact I was using a kid’s computer called an OLPC xo. I didn’t really like the main Woot site because I was so afraid that I was going to screw up something. But I did find Deals.Woot and the people there were nice enough to help me out so that I wouldn’t do something dumb and get into trouble (most of the time).
Matt hung out on this site a lot. In fact many of the K’s that Meh has, hung out on Deals.
Are you on Woot? I am now katblue there. (Barney was already taken.)
@Barney Ha! Apparently I thought that text was decorative. Hmm, should I post 7/14 lower down?
@Barney Wow, 2010! I haven’t spent much time (or money) at Woot, although I’ve bought some tee shirts, and I found a refurbished Ninja Foodi toaster oven there for my mother and brother. But is Deals a separate site from the main Woot?
@Kyeh Oh, there’s a lot of people around here that have been with Woot a very long time – from their beginning.
Deals was a part of Woot; we would post good deals that we found on the internet, kind of like our posting of deals here, but a whole lot more of them.
We had our own separate forum, too.
But bots and spammers started taking over the site and it was getting harder and harder to clean them out. Also, we might have gotten a little rowdy over there.
So, they shut us down.
I think you would have really liked it. (Ha, not that I’m saying you are rowdy.)
@mossygreen Post if you want to. BTW, I do stuff like that all of the time – I read it wrong or I just don’t see it.
@Barney Rowdier than Meh?? Or just less tolerable to the Amazon overlords? I looked at the current forum on Woot a time or two but it seemed boring compared to this one. I was actually pretty leery of this one at first, but got drawn in by the humor. Then over the pandemic it became a good escape from boredom and isolation. My sister thinks it’s stupid
!
@Kyeh The Woot forum is boring. Deals was fun and, yes, probably part of the reason it was shut down is that we did not comply with the new Amazon management.
I still miss it and there are others around here who do, too.
(Your sister might be right.)
@Barney @Kyeh I actually found Woot in Oct of '09, but never took to the forums. Well, I would poke around Deals or what was it, Mofi or somethong??
Anyway, guess I should have joined in on the fun sooner
@tinamarie1974 Yeah, you would have qualified as rowdy.
@Barney moi? No. Actually the older I get, the rowdy-er I get. I use to be quiet as a church mouse
@tinamarie1974 You’ve probably been hanging out on the wrong websites.
@Kyeh
I first found Woot thru a deals site link I think in 2010, tho I’d heard of them in the tech press years before, from the early days when they sometimes did special deals as product launches.
I think they started up in 2004, if that’s true, then I was a latecomer to the site.
Once I found Woot, I liked the forum conversations, and I liked the “conversational feel” of deals.woot forums quite a bit better than content/topics on the main site. So I stayed. And it was a lot of fun for a while.
Then Woot got sold to Amazon, and quite a few Woot employees who transitioned to Amazon couldn’t tolerate the new, and I suspect, hyper controlled, hyper competitive Amazon corp culture and so they started leaving Amazon.
Besides, there was that conversation where Bezos kinda suggested that he thought of Woot as an exotic meal he could consume, snd presumably digest then either comprehend … or, at least, use to his purposes.
I think @snapster started up Mediocre and Meh, bringing along many of his old Woot co-workers, as soon as the non-compete expired.
@snapster let the people in the Woot forums know about the new venture, and many folk started to call both places a sort of online home.
As for rowdiness, the deals.woot crowd weren’t rowdy, tho sometimes they criticized some questionable/nasty forum decisions/enforcement by the deals.woot mods.
(The deals.woot mods often gave the impression of being quite immature, self-absorbed, out-of-control, and professionally-offended, even in comparison to a two year old in the midst of a full-on tantrum.)
And at one point the deals.woot mods acted/posted very unprofessionally and horribly toward the forum members: there was mod remark that kinda compared the forum people to excrement (and that wasn’t intended as a joke)
At that event, many of the most loyal, kind, and interesting deals.woot posters left deals.woot and main woot forever. (Remember the wonderful @hobbit?).
And then the conversation declined, with some many excellent folk gone for good
But what really killed deals.woot was the deal spam by every charlatan or counterfeiter with a keyboard.
There was a main forum section for posting deals, and a second forum section for just conversation.
Deals could be voted on, which meant that every counterfeiting-type and charlatan-type deal poster was busy hiring companies or paying employees/family/friends to upvote their overpriced junk.
So the deals section became pure garbage. The main deals forums were filled with junk deals to the point that no one bothered to post good deals anymore.
And that drove away the the rest of the conversationalists;
those people came here, or went to the main woot forums, or vanished. The genuine conversation dwindled and dwindled. V sad to watch.
And so deals.woot became something hideous and unbearable, having once been wonderful.
And finally, when deals.woot had become little more than pure, unadulterated spam/junk, woot pulled the plug on a site that had become a no more than a useless, garbage-filled monstrosity.
@f00l
Yikes. Maybe I’m just as glad I wasn’t around to watch that happen.
7/14 for me
June '16. Still waiting on a random mediocre surprise.
11/14
Joined the site 7/14
12/14
7/15
@cf1 As I recall, there were hints on Woot that something interesting was coming soon but you had to sign up with google or something else I don’t have so I was totally unaware of all the beginning of Meh stuff.
7/14. Today is my first day back here in years. Life took over and I forgot all about Meh until I was reminded of it randomly in conversation with my wife
@billywubba and I’m also seeing I’m listed as an ex-VMP. Whoops
Just looked on my profile 11/2016. My last order was in 2020 (though it is something that I use on the daily! Such a good deal). Exactly what am I paying $5/mo for? I guess to keep the site going, and knowing that I’m not going to be able to get back in if I cancel, so there’s some exclusivity to it I guess.
@jds2001 No shit!
Half of the crap is now QVC sites with washed up celebrities. Do they really think that the same people who think weird gadgets are cool watch the morning talk whatever at the retirement community? They have 2 or more of those sites.
Oh my, my $5 a month, without any VMP IRKs (Thanks, again, for kick in the nuts, to bots and fiber connections.)
I wrote to customer service saying my giftee really loved the blue 5.5qt BK dutch oven. None left! I would even pay the same price. I thought, maybe they would see: wow, you have paid a lot of money, rarely got irks but always tried, we promised perks, it isn’t blue but here is whatever… thanks for being a VMP.
I would put money on them offering BK dutch ovens, maybe blue?, in the exact size and never ever contacting me beyond that.
I got a crap faux-weber grill I paid for. Customer service wanted me to ship it back. Come on, that makes no sense. I just ate it and have not use it sense. BTW if you are in Central OH, you are welcome to it.
If it were not for casemates and the people who have randomly sent me stuff because of their kidness, there is absolutely no reason for me to keep this. meh doesn’t care about me, my loyalty, my anything but so long as their monthly charge goes through.
In the early years I would cancel my VMP if I went a month without buying anything, and when we got the announcement that VMP was going away, I was off it and figured I’d stay off it. It was disabled beginning on March 1, 2017, but IIRC it didn’t actually get disabled until the middle of that day. I signed up for it in those final hours, figuring I’d cancel within a month if I didn’t use it, but I’ve used it enough since to where I kept it til now.
I imagine my fellow 3/17 VMPers are few and far between, considering the circumstances.
@lljk Hi 3/2017 twin! I had canceled when you could still go back on also. I was debating whether to sign up again when the announcement was posted then forgot and remembered on the first.
Officially 8/16, but there was a card lapse in there so no idea how long it’s really been. Though I was too late to get any of the mythical freebies I’ve heard about.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@Ignorant
That’s weird that yours doesn’t say a date…
07/14
11/14
Thu, Jun 26th 2014 at 4:02pm ET.
7/15
Wed, Sep 3rd 2014 at 12:46am ET
I’m 43, but I doubt I’m the oldest VMP.
Am I doing this right?
@zachdecker
Lol
I’ve been a VMP since around the third month after Meh launched, however my credit card lapsed and although I was able to get my status back, my “member since” date is off
Wine.woot was my thing. Cause not just wine but lots of gourmet / foodie goodies. My daughter actually discovered woot and the BoCs … I remember when she bought her first. She quickly lost interest
11/2014, bought the thanksgiving turkey cooking package because we needed something in it, I can’t remember what. Wine woot kickstarter, I’m getting more out of that than meh these days.
Sept of 14…
11/2015
11/2015, but getting it reset to its original start date is on my bucket list.
I think my first purchase here was Free VMP. Dec 25th 2014 at 11:31pm
Used it, renewed it, let it lapse on and off until Membership came on the scene. Haven’t missed a VMP payment since 2/17.
10/15. Also a woot transplant.
Never had a lapse in mind. Guess I’ve been lucky. Or just more attentive?
8/2014.
9/2014 Getting old
since day 1 bro - i lost it for a few days bc of a card update, i miss the free socks.
July 14th 2014 11:35pm ET
11/16 due to a card lapse, was 10/14 before that.
7/2014
I don’t order so much, but now it feels sentimental.
Is this the bingo hall? I’m looking for the buffet with all the other recovered old shirt.woot addicts.
July 2014. I have a feeling if I calculated how much I spent on VMP over the years I’d be pretty sad.
08/14
July 2016
5/2015
9/2014
04/2016 but been on Meh since the first day
Since 12/16 here because that was when they were cut off. Before I’d have it on and off
July 8, 2014 … $5 x 12 mos x 8 years = $480. I guess I’ve gotten a few IRK’s and a lot of grey socks out of the deal.
@SColburn So many grey socks.
@SColburn - Whoa!
I started 7/14 with a one-day blip somewhere along the line.
$480 Pushing me that much closer to the quitting precipice, though to be fair, that amount is ameliorated by some decent Fuku luck.
Budget is tighter these days, those $5’s add up.
Just wondering what I am. Well at least in the meh world. I’m sure I’m human. I should have joined on the first day. wow, it doesn’t come up anything. I wonder if meh took it away from me?
September 2014, so not the oldest, but old just the same!